Consider Effects Of Republican Wins

August 19, 2012

Before people vote in November, they should consider what will happen if the Republicans win the presidency and the Congress. They will pass the budget of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which Mitt Romney has endorsed. Ryan wants to privatize Social Security, make Medicare a voucher program, let the states handle Medicaid with some federal help and cut taxes for the rich.

He admires the views of the late Ayn Rand, who said you can only be truly free if you take responsibility for yourself. That sounds good until you think about the many, especially children and the elderly, who need a helping hand along the way. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama have said that we're all in this together. The Republicans say you're on your own.

Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, said that the government should do for the people what they can't do for themselves. President Roosevelt understood that when he put the country on the right track in the 1930s with his programs of social reform, Social Security being the crown jewel. Republicans opposed it, then and now. They also opposed Medicare in 1965, when President Johnson got it passed.

A recent op-ed article in the Washington Post said this about the GOP: "It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The so-called "low information" voters need to inform themselves of what's at stake in November. A Republican victory would not be in the best interest of most Americans.